With hundreds of clients, investors and partners gathered into a single room, conferences can provide enterprises with a rare opportunity to gather a wealth of information on which paths they should be taking as they move into the future.

Actually accessing this information, however, can be tricky. If the topic is sensitive, for example, asking the audience to raise their hands or shout out loud simply isn’t appropriate.

The Challenge – Moving forward with discretion

A company operating in the energy sector was hosting a conference to explore sales targets and explain the new things going on in the business with senior management and various suppliers. Previous conferences had simply involved a projector being set up in a room, with one presenter talking to a room of several hundred people while going through a slide deck. The company wanted to move forward with their conferences, improving their technology to become more modern and include the audience.

The company had a list of questions for attendees to answer at the event, though due to the fact that there were several different suppliers present, the answers to some of these questions had to remain private.

The Solution – Connecting with the audience

The company began searching for a solution that would allow for quick responses to questions, displaying the audience’s answers via sleek visualisations when appropriate, but allowing for the presenter to hide them when not.

The company got in touch with Midland Conference Services, a longtime partner of Lumi, who put forward Lumi’s Connector as the ideal solution to their problem. The Connector is a handheld device that allows audiences to instantly engage with presentations via a full text keyboard and built-in high-quality microphone. The complex polling options allow presenters to pose virtually any question to their audiences, ensuring everyone has their say.

The Connectors were placed on the seats of the conference room, and were activated once the attendees inserted their keycards, which they received upon arriving at the event. These keycards contained valuable demographics pertaining to the holder, such as which company they worked for, granting the host company crucial data on the opinions of their various suppliers and partners.

The Results – Engaging feedback

At the event, the interactive presentation went smoothly.

“There was a guest speaker at the event who explained the process to the audience,” says Sophie Clarkson, event manager at Midland Conference Services. “Lumi had provided a slide explaining how to use the keypad properly, which worked for the guest speaker, as they didn’t have to explain too much about it – it was all quite self-explanatory with the slides.”

While the company had a list of 15 questions prepared for the attendees of the conference, six additional questions were added at the last minute. Thanks to the intuitive technology that Lumi provided, the presenter was able to add these extra questions seamlessly to the presentation, on the fly.

The results to some of these questions were displayed on screen using graphs and percentages, while the responses to the more private questions, which were for the company’s internal use, simply showed as “data captured,” letting the audience know their opinions were recorded.

“The feedback for the whole event was very positive,” says Clarkson. “The client was surprised with how quickly they can use technology now, and how it allowed them to see the results there and then. It was very good for the more sensitive topics, as the attendees could remain anonymous and didn’t have to shout out their answers to the room.”

According to Clarkson, the company will continue to use Lumi’s technology, including the Connector, at future events, seeing it as emblematic of the direction conferences will be heading to in the future.

“In the past, a lot of companies wanted to include more technology at their events, but they didn’t really understand how to incorporate it and they didn’t know what was available to them, they just felt that was the way to go moving forward,” explains Clarkson. “Now they know more about the tools they can actually use. They want their conferences to be more modern, they want to use tools like keypads to engage with audiences and get feedback as quickly and accurately as possible on screen. With the IML Connector, everybody has the option to answer the question if they want to. Being anonymous eliminates any of the hierarchies or any levels of management companies have; everyone is asked the same question.”